d is not satisfied
with its own civilization, and keeps fidgeting at it and altering it
again and again, until room is made for them. George Sand thought the
French people,--meaning principally, again, by the French people the
_people_ properly so called, the peasant,--she thought it "the most
kindly, the most amiable, of all peoples." Nothing is more touching than
to read in her _Journal_, written in 1870, while she was witnessing what
seemed to be "the agony of the Latin races," and undergoing what seemed
to be the process of "dying in a general death of one's family, one's
country, and one's nation," how constant is her defence of the people,
the peasant, against her Republican friends. Her Republican friends were
furious with the peasant; accused him of stolidity, cowardice, want of
patriotism; accused him of having given them the Empire, with all its
vileness; wanted to take away from him the suffrage. Again and again
does George Sand take up his defence, and warn her friends of the folly
and danger of their false estimate of him. "The contempt of the masses,
there," she cries, "is the misfortune and crime of the present
moment!"[337] "To execrate the people," she exclaims again, "is real
blasphemy; the people is worth more than we are."

If the peasant gave us the Empire, says Madame Sand, it was because he
saw the parties of liberals disputing, gesticulating, and threatening to
tear one another asunder and France too; he was told _the Empire is
peace_, and he accepted the Empire. The peasant was deceived, he is
uninstructed, he moves slowly; but he moves, he has admirable virtues,
and in him, says George Sand, is our life:--

"Poor Jacques Bonhomme! accuse thee and despise thee who will; for my
part I pity thee, and in spite of thy faults I shall always love thee.
Never will I forget how, a child, I was carried asleep on thy shoulders,
how I was given over to thy care and followed thee everywhere, to the
field, the stall, the cottage. They are all dead, those good old people
who have borne me in their arms; but I remember them well, and I
appreciate at this hour, to the minutest detail, the pureness, the
kindness, the patience, the good humor, the poetry, which presided over
that rustic education amidst disasters of like kind with those which we
are undergoing now. Why should I quarrel with the peasant because on
certain points he feels and thinks differently from what I do? There are
other essential points on w